The absurdity of a hotline to complain about motorway cones did for John Major largely because it came towards the end of a long period of Tory rule: it seemed to encapsulate a government that, re-elected for a fourth term, was running out of ideas, reduced to fiddling with footling policies about not very much.

Conventional wisdom holds that, had the Conservatives proposed such a scheme in the first bloom of their first term, even those who thought it silly would have let it pass. That's the commonly held view of, for example, the Formula One affair, when New Labour was accused of accepting a £1m donation from F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone in return for granting his sport an exemption from a ban on tobacco advertising. Because the story broke in 1997, when Tony Blair was still shiny and new, it caused minimal damage. Most politicos agree that, had the scandal emerged seven or eight years later, it might well have toppled the prime minister.

The forestry sell-off is clearly no scandal, but few would deny that it is a political error – inept in a way that makes the cones hotline look shrewd. Cameron admitted as much at prime minister's questions when he wrongfooted Ed Miliband, who had asked if the PM was happy with his policy on forests, by saying: "The short answer is no."

The question now is whether the old rule – that errors that come early are survived, while those that come late can prove fatal – will hold for Cameron and his coalition. Less than a year into his premiership, he'll hope that he proves to be more Blair than Major on this one – as on so many others.

The more serious riddle for the government is: how on earth did this policy get through in the first place? The politics of it were so obviously awful. Not only did it anger sandal-wearing enviro types, it was also bound to alienate Radio 4-listening, Telegraph-reading middle Englanders of the Tory heartland. It can't be justified as a necessary consequence of general belt-tightening across government: most calculations show the forestry plan would have saved little or, more likely, no money.

Cameron has to be concerned that his own Downing Street machine lacked the early-warning mechanisms that should have seen this one coming, scrunching the woodland plan into a ball the moment it was committed to paper. Blair would have had Alastair Campbell or Jonathan Powell or a dozen others to tell him this scheme needed to be strangled at birth. Why didn't Cameron?

What it confirms is that the lack of a director of political strategy in Downing Street has been a yawning and damaging gap. The good news for coalition supporters is that gap is set to be filled by Andrew Cooper, founder of the Populus polling company. He'll have his work cut out. His first move should be to pin today's Steve Bell cartoon above his desk – as a reminder of how quickly things can go wrong.